is a disease when it becomes habitual. It is connected with disease of the intestinal canal. Many dogs have a dry constipated habit, often greatly increased by the bones on which they are too frequently fed. This favours the disposition to mange and to many diseases depending on morbid secretions. It produces indigestion, encourages worms, blackens the teeth, and causes fetid breath. The food often accumulates in the intestines, and the consequence is inflammation of these organs. A dog should never be suffered to remain costive more than a couple of days. An aloetic ball or some Epsom salts should then be administered; and this failing to produce the desired effect, the castor-oil mixture, with spirits of buckthorn and white poppies, should be administered, and the use of the clyster-pipe resorted to. It may be necessary to introduce the finger or the handle of a spoon when the fæcal matter is more than usually hard, and it is with difficulty broken down; small doses of castor-oil should be afterwards resorted to, and recourse occasionally be had to boiled liver, which the dog will rarely refuse. The best means, however, of preventing costiveness in dogs, as well as in men, is regular exercise. A dog who is kept chained up in a kennel should be taken out and have a certain quantity of exercise once in the twenty-four hours. When this cannot be done, the food should consist chiefly of well-boiled farinaceous matter. DROPSY Another disease, which is not confined to the abdominal cavity, is dropsy: but, as in the dog it most commonly assumes that form which is termed ascites, or dropsy of the abdomen, it may be noticed in this place. It is seldom an idiopathic or primary affection, but is generally the consequence of some other disease, most commonly of an inflammatory kind. Dropsy is a collection of fluid in some part of the frame, either from increased exhalation, or from diminished absorption, the consequence of inflammation. The divisions of dropsy are into active and passive, or acute and chronic. The causes are also very properly arranged as predisposing and exciting. The diseases on which dropsy most frequently supervenes are fevers and visceral inflammations and obstructions. The dog is peculiarly subject to 'ascites' or 'dropsy of the belly', and the quantity of fluid contained in the abdomen is sometimes almost incredible. It is usually accompanied or characterised by a weak, unequal, small, and frequent pulse--paleness of the lips, tongue, and gums--flaccidity of the muscles, hurried breathing on the least exertion, feebleness of the joints, swellings of the lower limbs, effusion of fluid into the integuments or among the muscles, before there is any considerable effusion into the thorax or the abdomen, and an unhealthy appearance of the cutaneous surface. The urine seldom coagulates. This form of dropsy is usually seated in the abdomen or cellular tissue.